So upset is Mr. Franken, even to this day, over the way his critics spoke of him that at one point in his interview with Ms. Mayer, she reports, he began to cry. Nor is Mr. Franken the only one that has regrets. Ms. Mayer counts what she calls “a remarkable number” of Mr. Franken’s Senate colleagues who regret their own roles in his downfall.

Senator Leahy calls his decision to seek Mr. Franken’s resignation “one of the biggest mistakes” he’s made. Senator Heitkamp, now out of office, confessed she called for Mr. Franken to quit “without concern for exactly what this was.” Tammy Duckworth, Angus King, Bill Nelson, Jeff Merkley, Thos. Udall, all seem ashamed of failing to stand for due process. Maybe for penance they’ll quit, too.

Heh. Fat chance. Consequences are for the little people. Well, and for Bill Nelson, as it turned out.

Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley famously said “only little people pay taxes.” Clinton seems to feel the same way about obeying laws.

It won’t be that way with a President Trump. This isn’t because Trump is any less arrogant than Clinton (though it would be hard to be more arrogant). It’s because more people will be willing to tell Trump no. The civil service, which leans overwhelmingly Democratic, won’t be bending over backwards to do his will. The press can’t stand him. And Congress, even if controlled by the GOP, won’t support him if he misbehaves because so many Republicans dislike him, too.

The truth is, neither one of our leading candidates for president is a paragon of virtue. But only one of them has already made a habit of flouting the law while in office, selling favors and escaping the consequences, and only one of them is likely to be able to pull it off from the White House.

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told her husband she was deleting emails sent from his government account.

The revelation comes as both Ohrs remain under intense scrutiny for their ties to Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained a series of April 2016 emails from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department that show a correspondence between the Ohrs, an aide to Bruce Ohr named Lisa Holtyn, and Stefan Bress, a first secretary at the German Embassy.

They discussed setting up a dinner for the German delegation as well as a meeting to discuss Russian organized crime. Included in a proposed agenda is the “Impact of Russian influence operations in Europe (‘PsyOps/InfoWar’).”

On April 20, responding to the email thread with the subject line, “Analyst Russian Organized Crime – April 2016,” came the email from Nellie Ohr about deleting the emails. “Thanks! I’m deleting these emails now,” she said.

Bruce Ohr was an associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force while his wife Nellie was an independent contractor and Russia specialist.

ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE. ALSO, TAXES. College president who used public resources to campaign gets slap on the wrist. “A Michigan college president allegedly violated campaign and election law in the November elections. Schoolcraft College president Dr. Conway Jeffress and other administrators’ efforts focused on trying to pass a tax increase that would have brought in millions more dollars for the college.”

ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Massachusetts DA’s Sue To Keep ICE Out Of Courthouses. “This announcement comes less than a week after a Newton judge was indicted and suspended for allegedly conspiring with a court officer to help an illegal immigrant escape out the basement door of Newton District Court last spring.”

Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were 2018 runner-up candidates for governor in the country’s third- and ninth-largest states, are considered “rising stars” in the Democratic Party, and are engaging in “horrifying,” “shocking” rhetoric that is “threatening our democracy.”

That’s according to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. That’s what they said about Donald Trump, after all, for questioning the results an election that hadn’t even happened yet. Surely they must feel the same about Gillum and Abrams doing the same.

Gillum and Abrams have, to varying degrees, openly impugned the integrity of their governor’s race losses in Florida and Georgia, to the sound of crickets in mainstream and liberal media.

Clinton, Kaine, Democrats, and the media were understandably vexed when Trump infamously said he would keep us all “in suspense” about accepting the results of the 2016 election. Even now, cable news talkers wonder in hushed tones if Trump would refuse to accept a 2020 defeat and leave the White House, or something.

Yet Abrams and Gillum continue to get away with irresponsible self-pity and delusion.

A D.C.-based think tank filed suit Wednesday against D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, claiming his office has refused to produce any kind of response to several Freedom of Information Act requests seeking documents related to an environmental legal scheme largely funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In that scheme, Bloomberg funded a new “center” of the New York University School of Law, and the school provides the funding for certain attorneys to be placed within attorney general offices (OAGs) around the country with the sole purpose of pursuing litigation and other legal work related to climate change.

The payment for these attorneys includes their ongoing salaries, so that the OAGs are able to essentially add an extra full-time staff member without having to dip into their budget.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has led the way in obtaining records to uncover the activities across the country, filed the suit asking a judge to compel Racine’s office to fully comply with the requests made under the district’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which closely mirrors the federal law of the same name.

A former senior investigator says he was fired for blowing the whistle on his boss, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who he alleged carried a gun while flying — in violation of federal law.

Gascón reacted with a “pattern of retaliation and harassment” that culminated in the termination of senior investigator Henry G. McKenzie on Oct. 30, 2017, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

In the Nov. 24 filing, McKenzie says that Gascón — who is also the city’s former police chief — took a gun on board commercial flights repeatedly after becoming D.A. in January 2012.

According to the suit, members of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office Investigators Association, which included McKenzie, discussed the “need to blow the whistle” on Gascón’s potential criminal violations in early 2017.

Sometime that spring, an investigator in the district attorney’s office contacted the Transportation Security Administration to report Gascón’s alleged unlawful travel with a firearm.

“The issue is flying armed while not being a peace officer, and flying armed when there was no need to” for law enforcement purposes, McKenzie’s attorney, Fulvio Cajina, told us.

Under federal law, peace officers who are armed while traveling are required to state that they are doing so for good reason — a reason related to their work — under penalty of perjury. The investigators believed that, as district attorney, Gascón was no longer an active peace officer and had no need to travel with a gun.

In the months after the TSA was notified, five of the Investigators Association’s seven-member governing body were either terminated or reprimanded. In all, according to the suit, “nearly half of the district attorney’s investigative department — or about 14 staff members — “were either terminated or forced to resign under intense pressure within a five-month span,” the suit said.

Remember this when Democrats go on about gun control, or the rule of law.

Most strikingly this is a people’s rebellion against the onerous consequences of climate-change policy, against the politics of environmentalism and its tendency to punish the little people for daring to live relatively modern, fossil-fuelled lives. This is new. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing perhaps the first mass uprising against eco-elitism and we should welcome it with open arms to the broader populist revolt that has been sweeping Europe for a few years now.

Jupiter’s response? To create a “High Council for the Climate.” It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of warning from French history about ignoring the true demands of the people.

WHY ARE FAMOUS LEFTISTS SO FULL OF THEMSELVES AND SO MEAN TO THE LITTLE PEOPLE? When Professors Think They’re Rock Stars. “There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean ‘rules I shouldn’t have to follow.’”

Plus: “Just as in the communist and socialist regimes that academics so admire, the universities all have an elite class at the top (permanently installed thanks to tenure), while the masses scurry around trying their best not to upset the rulers, lest they lose their livelihood. Maybe capitalist bosses are pigs too, but at least one isn’t subject to their moral preening as well as their abusive behavior.”

PRIVACY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Exclusive: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger – sources. “The U.S. government is trying to force Facebook Inc (FB.O) to break the encryption in its popular Messenger app so law enforcement may listen to a suspect’s voice conversations in a criminal probe, three people briefed on the case said, resurrecting the issue of whether companies can be compelled to alter their products to enable surveillance.”

DIVERSITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: How an ultra-exclusive public school has avoided a citywide diversity push. “The children of Cynthia Nixon, Samantha Bee and Louis C.K. got into this popular public middle school, while hundreds of others are shut out every year. . . . One mother said that during an admissions interview, her daughter was asked what her parents did for a living.”

A $90,000-per-year director with Mayor de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice was arrested along with two men Saturday night in Queens after a loaded gun was found in their car — double-parked just blocks away from the scene of an earlier shooting, police said.

Reagan Stevens — the Office’s Deputy Director of Youth and Strategic Initiatives — was busted on two counts of criminal possession of a weapon after cops found the loaded 9mm gun in the glovebox of the 2002 Infiniti double-parked on the corner of 177th Street and 106th Avenue in Jamaica around 10:25 p.m., cops said.

A single shell casing was also found in the car, police sources said.

The gun seized from the Infiniti carries an eight-round clip, but only had three rounds in it when it was found, sources said.

The officers were scanning the area for suspicious activity after the NYPD’s ShotSpotter system detected five gunshots on nearby 109th Avenue around 10 p.m., authorities said.

THIS IS HOW CLINTONS THANK CALIFORNIA? Deadlines for disclosing charitable donations from governments are for the little people. More from master Clinton Foundation sleuth Charles Ortel. And he’s just getting warmed up. Things are about to get very hot on this front.

ETHICS GUIDELINES? THAT’S FOR LITTLE PEOPLE: The Washington Post, to its credit, established social media guidelines as long ago as 2011. (The New York Times only followed suit last year). Those guidelines seem to be founded on a self-image of honest and brave truth-seeking reporters able to separate their own biases from what they tweet, lest the sterling reputation of The Washington Post be sullied:

Social-media accounts maintained by Washington Post journalists — whether on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or elsewhere — reflect upon the reputation and credibility of The Washington Post’s newsroom…we must be ever mindful of preserving the reputation of The Washington Post for journalistic excellence, fairness and independence. Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything — including photographs or video — that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism.

This morning Twitchy reports that Washington Post “congressional reporter” Erica Werner certainly has some strong feelings on Mike “Benghazi bomb-thrower” Pompeo as Secretary of State and Gina “torture overseer” Haspel as CIA director, and tweeted out the following:

“A Benghazi bomb-thrower will be SecState and a torture overseer will be CIA director — IF CONFIRMED BY THE SENATE”

Now, if she were a columnist, I’d have no beef with this, after all, opinions are what they are paid to write. But when a “congressional reporter” resorts to this kind of slimery, well, she just gives the public more reasons to distrust her reporting — and that of The Post in general.

It’s a good thing there’s an Ombudsman or Public Editor there to keep an eye on these things. Oh, wait…**UPDATE: ORIGINAL TWEET FLUSHED DOWN MEMORY HOLE**

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC. (RELATED: FBI Agents Discussed ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Win)

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

There have been so many episodes like this where crucial evidence is “lost” that I don’t believe any of it anymore.

Surveillance data the National Security Agency vowed to preserve related to pending lawsuits has been erased, and the agency did not take several precautions it told a federal court it would take to ensure the data did not get deleted, court filings reveal.

Top NSA officials should be jailed for contempt. But they won’t because the law is for the little people.

RESERVATIONS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Woman accuses United of giving her seat to Houston’s Sheila Jackson Lee. “A passenger on a flight from Houston to Washington D.C. has accused United Airlines of giving her first-class seat to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. D-Houston, and then threatening to remove her from the plane for complaining and snapping a photo of the Houston congresswoman. ‘It was just so completely humiliating,’ said Jean-Marie Simon, a 63-year-old attorney and private school teacher who used 140,000 miles on Dec. 3 to purchase the first-class tickets to take her from Washington D.C. to Guatemala and back home.”

Sheila Jackson Lee’s response is — wait for it, wait for it — that she’s a racist for complaining.

After all, their trust-funded professors and legacies are always loftily lecturing the rest of us about how we must pay our “fair share.” It’s an “investment in the future.” And this would be their favorite kind of tax, one that’s imposed solely on the “one percenters” and their “unearned income.”

Not to mention, it’s “for the children.”

How many times do the swells quote Oliver Wendell Holmes that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”

The price we pay, apparently, not them.

As a famous man once said, at some point I think you’ve made enough money.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Thompson Staffer Still Employed After Tax Conviction. “A spokesman for the Mississippi Democrat confirmed Thursday that Isaac Lanier Avant, who served as Thompson’s chief of staff, was still employed by the office. Asked if Avant would remain employed following the new charges relating to his security clearance form, the spokesman said he believed Thompson would be making a statement on the subject soon.”

The concern is palpable after Transport for London on Friday said it would not renew the ride-hailing company’s licence, which expires next week. At 60, Mr Singh is the sole breadwinner in his house because his wife does not work.

“I need this job for living. I have bills to pay. I’m almost 61, who is going to give me a job now?”

For 10 years he worked for a private hire company in Ilford, east London, for lower pay and less flexibility.

Crawling along Embankment in midday traffic, he scrolls through his phone, showing his weekly earnings: £1,050, £897, £841 and £541 — a week when he took some holiday — after Uber has taken its cut.

By only working during the day because he prefers not to drive at night, he is making more money than he did in his previous job. He is also happier.

“You always had problems with customers, some who didn’t want to pay,” he says of his job at the private hire company.

“With Uber for two years now, I have never had a customer problem, never had a problem at all.” . . .

Mohammed Nizam Jearally has not heard the news. He sits in silence when told about the ruling. “How can they do that?” he asks. Another pause. “How can they do that?”.

Uber was a lifeline for Mr Jearally when he was made redundant just over eight months ago.

He had worked in an office role for the NHS for almost 12 years. But when Capita, an outsourcing company, won the contract for the work it moved the jobs to Leeds, where labour and office space are cheaper.

At first, he drove customers while he focused on applying for new roles.

But after discovering he could earn as much driving for Uber as sitting in an office, he gave up looking at new vacancies.

THE COLUMN THAT ALL AMERICA WANTS. THE COLUMN THAT ALL AMERICA NEEDS: Who else but David Brooks, the man, the myth, the sandwich shop legend, the Fonzie of Fifth Avenue, can explain to the readers of the New York Times “How Cool Works in America Today”?

Cool had other social meanings. It was a way of showing you weren’t playing the whole Horatio Alger game; you weren’t a smarmy career climber. It was a way to assert the value of the individual in response to failed collectivisms — to communism and fascism, to organized religion. The cool person is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.

To be cool was to be a moral realist. The cruelties of the wars had exposed the simplistic wholesomeness of good and evil middle-class morality. A character like Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” is trying to live by his own honor code in an absurd moral world.

Until he realizes that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” and joins the effort defeat Hitler. Having taken an interest in the horrors of the world beyond his café’s doors, does that mean that Bogey’s Rick is no longer cool? Brooks goes on to explain to his readers at the Times the difference between “cool” and “woke:”

Cool was politically detached, but being a social activist is required for being woke. Cool was individualistic, but woke is nationalistic and collectivist. Cool was emotionally reserved; woke is angry, passionate and indignant. Cool was morally ambiguous; woke seeks to establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable.

But earlier in his column, Brooks wrote that “You can [still] see cool figures like Kendrick Lamar…” But if “cool was politically detached, but being a social activist is required for being woke,” how does that explain this album by Lamar and its cover, as Victor Davis Hanson noted last year:

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers?

For a much better definition of how “cool” changed American society, it’s still tough to beat the column the late Michael Kelly wrote on the topic 20 years ago, after Frank Sinatra passed away at age 82:

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even. Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

“I started traveling, meeting with different leaders throughout Europe. I didn’t know how bad the problem is with contemporary anti-Semitism there,” [award-winning filmmaker and New York Times bestselling author Ian Halperin] told the Observer. “There are less than 2 million Jews left in Europe, which is very alarming—a place where Jews have long been an integral part of society and whose valuable contributions to the culture are immeasurable.”

“During my research,” Halperin continued, “I came upon Roger Waters, and I couldn’t believe he was singling out Israel when there are so many truly egregious violators of human rights in the world. Why is he going after Israel? So, I began asking people what this guy has against Israel. To me, an attack on Israel is an attack against the Jewish people.”

Halperin met with psychologists who work with Holocaust survivors and their families. He described the effect of Waters’ floating pig bearing the Star of David as “unforgiveable” for survivors, comparing it to a scene in his film where a three-year-old Palestinian girl is “brainwashed” into believing Jews are pigs.

In preparation for the documentary, Halperin interviewed leaders in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. They found Waters’ comparison to Israel offensive and demeaning to their people’s suffering.

Waters is a self-admitted John Lennon worshiper, and during the 1970s, increasingly attempted to introduce the brutally direct and introspective lyric style of Plastic Ono Band, Lennon’s first proper solo album, into the swirling art rock atmosphere of Pink Floyd’s sound. Just as Lennon fixated upon the early death of his mother to write some of his most personal material in the last years of the Beatles and the start of his solo career, the death of Waters’ father at Anzio when Waters was five months old became Waters’ obsession during The Wall and The Final Cut, Waters’ last two albums with the Floyd.

In 1942’s Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart’s character famously tells Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa to flee the Nazis with Resistance leader Victor Laszlo, because in the midst of WWII, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

It was four decades between that film and the movie version of The Wall, the album that Time famously dubbed “the libretto for Me-Decade narcissism.” So much so that, based on the film version of the album, it seems as if Waters would much prefer to have his father back, even if it meant England not entering WWII. Given the implications of that, no wonder Waters is railing so strongly against Israel. Or as Mark Steyn once wrote, “The old joke — that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz — gets truer every week.”

Biden was also in Manhattan Criminal Court in 2014, on charges of resisting arrest, obstruction of justice and harassment stemming from a dustup with her Tribeca roommate.

In that case, the silver-spoon Georgetown University graduate was accused of taking a swing at a female cop who responded in Sept. 2013 to a drag out fight over unpaid rent between Biden and her roommate.

“I shouldn’t be handcuffed!” cops said Biden railed at the time. “You don’t know who you’re doing this to!”

She was given another sweetheart deal in that case: a promise that the charges would be dismissed if she stayed out of trouble for six months.

The charges were eventually dismissed and sealed.

Biden didn’t even have to show up in court to get that deal — her then-lawyer James Liguori told another Manhattan judge that she was serving her second rehab stint at Caron Renaissance Ocean Drive, a posh inpatient facility in Delray Beach, Fla.

WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY? Women abandon jobs with Mayor de Blasio because of his condescending tone. “A New York Times story published over the weekend says that 31 people hired for top positions by Mayor Bill de Blasio have left since 2014. Of those 31 people, 22 were women. The Times interviewed “a dozen women” to find out why so many of them were abandoning de Blasio. One reason given for the exodus was the mayor’s condescending tone and penchant for belittling people who work for him.”

Like Hillary, he can’t stand the little people, even though he purports to stand for them.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump’s transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities “unmasked” after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.

The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain “masked” if American communications are swept up during surveillance of foreign individuals.

Laws are for the little people. But Obama officials are little people now.

As ethical standards slide across the American political system, the country has come to depend more and more on the integrity of its people in uniform. But the military cannot be immune to the cultural slide away from the higher moral standards of past generations.

The overwhelming majority of men and women in the U.S. military who hold themselves to the highest personal and professional standards. But over time those numbers will decrease—unless American society as a whole can recover the moral balance that was once a defining characteristic of this country.

We cannot walk away from the moral and spiritual foundations of American greatness without losing our freedom and power and wealth. It is clear enough today that from the White House down, too many people in public life are unwilling to make the sacrifices and enforce the standards that a free society demands.

Well, the “White House” in question here wasn’t the Trump White House, but rather one based in the the “rules are for the little people” environment that we’ve known for so long.

And note that the wrongdoers are members of the “intelligence community.”

So the issue is rather squarely posed: Holder testified that he had never “been involved in” or even “heard of” any “potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material.” And yet, he participated in “extensive deliberations,” “discussed” and approved of the filing of an application for a search warrant that specifically represented to the court that a reporter has “potential criminal liability in this matter.” It is hard to imagine a more direct contradiction.

ABOLISH THE ATF: A.T.F. Filled Secret Bank Account With Millions From Shadowy Cigarette Sales. “Working from an office suite behind a Burger King in southern Virginia, operatives used a web of shadowy cigarette sales to funnel tens of millions of dollars into a secret bank account. They weren’t known smugglers, but rather agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The operation, not authorized under Justice Department rules, gave agents an off-the-books way to finance undercover investigations and pay informants without the usual cumbersome paperwork and close oversight, according to court records and people close to the operation.”

The chief of staff to Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson was sentenced to four months in prison for failing to file an individual income tax return for five years, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Issac Lanier Avant of Arlington, Va., will serve his time in a nonstandard manner, putting in 30 days first then serving every weekend in prison for 12 months – the total of which is four months. Avant will then spend one year on probation and have to pay $149,962 to the Internal Revenue Service in restitution. It’s unclear whether he will remain a top aide to Thompson.

Avant has worked in the House of Representatives as a chief of staff for 15 years. In December 2006, he was given the additional role of Democratic staff director for the House Homeland Security Committee. He did not file taxes from 2009 to 2013 when he earned more than $165,000. In total, the IRS lost $153,522, according to the Justice statement.

His federal income taxes were not withheld those years because he had improperly submitted a form to his employer in 2005 claiming he was exempt.

A federal appeals court ruled in July 2016 that Holdren must release to a lower magistrate all work-related emails on the account. The emails are being sought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market nonprofit foundation.

White House officials told the court there are no undisclosed work-related emails, but CEI disputes that contention. (RELATED: DOE Does Little To Stop Senior Officials From Using Private Emails)

“CEI contends that OSTP is attempting to re-litigate the issue on which it already lost in the circuit,” CEI said in a statement Wednesday. “Moreover, OSTP’s has provided no reason to believe that Holdren has in fact forwarded all of his relevant private emails.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is returning thousands of dollars in donations linked to what may be one of the largest straw-donor schemes ever uncovered.

A small law firm that has given money to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Harry Reid, President Obama and many others is accused of improperly funneling millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers. The program was exposed by the Center for Responsive Politics and the same team of Boston Globe investigative reporters featured in the movie “Spotlight.”

The Thornton Law Firm has just 10 partners, but dollar for dollar, it’s one of the nation’s biggest political donors, reports CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil.

But according to the firm’s own documents – leaked by a whistleblower — days or even hours after making these donations, partners received bonuses matching the amount they gave.

“Once the law firm knew that we had these records, they didn’t deny that this was the case,” said Scott Allen, Boston Globe’s Spotlight editor.

“If you give a donation and then somebody else reimburses you for that contribution, that is a clear violation of the spirit and the letter of the law at the state and federal levels,” Allen added.

● “A police car assisting Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s motorcade collided with another vehicle on the West Side of Manhattan on Tuesday as Mr. Biden was on his way to…a taping of ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,’ which is recorded at a studio on 11th Avenue near West 52nd Street….Two officers and the driver of the livery cab were taken to a hospital with neck and back injuries, the police said. None of the injuries were serious.”

● “Part of a motorcade escorting Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a minor accident Thursday while traveling in Queens, N.Y., WNBC-TV reported. Two officers with the New York Police Department motorcycle unit sustained minor injuries during the incident and were undergoing treatment at a local hospital, according to the report. Biden was not delayed by the accident, who met with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier Thursday.”

As James Joyner of Outside the Beltway wrote in November of 2010 after a Forbes columnist wrote a piece satirically asking, “Strip Joe Biden of His Motorcade?” “Do I think the vice president should be stripped of his motorcade privileges? No. For one thing, I’m pretty sure Joe Biden wasn’t driving any of the cars in question, so it’s unreasonable to blame him. And, despite my general distaste for VIP motorcades and the inconveniences they pose for The Little People, there are legitimate security concerns for someone in Biden’s position. But there is something odd going on here. At very least, an investigation ought to be launched to figure out why this is happening.”

Fortunately for Biden, his boss’s administration had much more pressing scandals to cover up over the years.

Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.

Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.

Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.

But soldiers say the military is reneging on 10-year-old agreements and imposing severe financial hardship on veterans whose only mistake was to accept bonuses offered when the Pentagon needed to fill the ranks.

This is a disgrace. But these guys are little people, and little people are the only ones who have to worry about the rules nowadays.

In an interview with Fox News this past April, President Obama asserted that he did not put pressure on the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI—not just in this case but in any case,” he said. There is now mounting evidence suggesting Obama’s claim was false.

“Newly disclosed emails show top Obama Administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server,” reported Bryon Tau for The Wall Street Journal on October 7. The emails were obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit requesting those records.

A few months before White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri went to work for her campaign, emails show her in damage control for Clinton as early as 2015, when news first broke that Clinton’s private server existed. In one chain of emails between Palmieri and State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, Palmieri asked Psaki to ensure that Secretary of State John Kerry wasn’t asked about Clinton’s private email server during an upcoming CBS interview. “Good to go on killing CBS idea,” Psaki responded back to Palmieri, according to the Journal, adding, “going to hold on any other TV options just given the swirl of crap out there.”

In March 2015, The New York Times reported that Obama said he didn’t know Clinton was using a private email address. That turned out to be false, as the second FBI report on their investigation into Clinton’s private server revealed that the president used a pseudonym in email communications with her. “How is this not classified?” Clinton aide Huma Abedin asked the FBI during their interview.

If that exchange took place in a foreign country, American diplomats would be denouncing it. It ought to be regarded as the evening’s most important moment, and its most shameful: the violation of a democratic principle that distinguishes free polities from authoritarian ones. . . .

All the same, it was a telling, lamentable milestone in America’s politics. Mr Trump had already set new lows in decency, honesty and intellectual incoherence. With his threats against Mrs Clinton he took a step down a dark road that every American should renounce.

It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that their outrage is inevitably selective. Also, while we’re talking about banana republic stuff, note that while Trump made a threat, Hillary actually saw a filmmaker jailed in order to support a political narrative. I don’t recall The Economist speaking so strongly about that. . . .

This exchange has led to “Oh my God, Trump wants to jail his political enemies, and this is further proof he wants to turn America into a banana republic” punditry and some analysis of how a president might be able to abuse executive power.

I have absolutely no doubt that Trump idolizes strongman-style leaders. He’s made it abundantly clear that he cares only about “getting things done” and has no concern—or even grasp—of the limitations of the president.

Nevertheless, the pearl-clutching response to this deliberately ignores the very real anger over how Clinton seems to have been treated differently by the same Department of Justice that tends to throw the book at “normal” Americans. In actuality, even Trump knows full well he can’t just send Clinton to a prison cell. He said he’s going to investigate her. He believes she’ll end up in jail as a result of this investigation. And as Jacob Sullum noted earlier, Clinton remains remarkably insouciant about the reality of how potentially serious her private email server scandal was.

Lost in the massive media blitz that began on Friday over Trump’s disgusting way of talking about women was the fact that Jeffrey Hurant, the CEO of gay escort site Rentboy.com, would plead guilty to federal charges of promoting prostitution and would not appeal the government’s demand that he fork over $10 million in revenue the site had earned.

Hurant is not accused of doing anything more than facilitating consensual sexual contact between men. When the Department of Homeland Security first helped the New York Police shut them down, there was no evidence of human trafficking or nonconsensual activity. But they were also making a lot of money, and that’s exactly what the government jumped at, immediately attempting to seize Rentboy’s profits. And they’ve succeeded.

Why is there more outrage about Trump wanting to have Clinton investigated by the Department of Justice than there is about how the DOJ and federal government treats everybody else?

Laws are for the little people. Trump was threatening one of the Big People, which is why the other Big People and their hangers-on are so upset.

GOVERNMENT: Amid California drought, Los Angeles water department waters fake grass. “The seemingly superfluous watering has angered neighbors who say they’ve taken pains to reduce their own water use amid the threat of citations. The DWP has stepped up its enforcement against heavy water users this year, issuing more than two dozen financial penalties to homeowners in the first four months of the year, according to reports.”

Who could have foreseen that the completely disorderly admission of hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into Germany from countries with terrorism problems would turn out to be an issue? Apparently not German Chancellor Angela Merkel, until now.

On Tuesday, Merkel told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that part of the reason the problem got so out of control was because Europe had ignored it for so long.

“There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment — and in Germany we ignored both the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution,” Merkel said, according to a translation from Reuters.

She said the European Union had “rejected a proportional distribution of the refugees” when the problem first became apparent. Germany has taken in more than 1 million refugees, but the EU had let each country come up with their own plan at first.

But then Merkel acknowledged that the continent failed to properly handle the migration. “We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way,” she said. “That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area.”

The “Schengen area” refers to the 26 European countries that stopped requiring passports for travel between them.

Maybe if Merkel and her ilk had recognized the dangers of letting so many people in without having space for them – or knowing who they were – they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in now.

Virtue-signalling is no basis for policy, but it’s the only moral compass the EU’s leaders have. Besides, the costs always fall on the little people, not the leaders.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Congressional Staffer Charged With Failure To File Tax Returns On $170,000 Salary For Five Years. “According to the criminal information and affidavit, Isaac Lanier Avant of Arlington, Virginia, is a staff member employed by the U.S. House of Representatives since approximately 2002. For tax years 2009 through 2013, Avant earned annual wages of over $170,000, but did not timely file a personal income tax return for any of those years. In May 2005, Avant filed a form with his employer that falsely claimed he was exempt from federal income taxes.”

Rep. Jim Jordan and other conservatives are reviving efforts to press the House to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen as the embattled agency head tries to woo Democrats and undecided Republicans.

The Ohio Republican, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview that he and other allies were weighing the use of procedural tactics similar to the July bid by Louisiana GOP Rep. John Fleming to bring up an impeachment resolution as a privileged measure bypassing committee consideration. The measure calls for formal impeachment of Koskinen for misstatements and a failure to cooperate with a House investigation of the IRS’ handling of tax-exempt status requests from conservative groups.